By Grief Transformed: Susan Olsen (2010)

Newsletter 2011

By Grief Transformed

Susan Olson

New Orleans, Spring Journal Books, 2010, 276 pp.

This book is a heartfelt exploration of grief, a love letter to a precious daughter who has passed away, as well as a description of a journey through the landscape of dreams. Susan Olson is a practicing Jungian analyst in Atlanta who graduated from the C.G.Jung Institute in Zurich. A few months after she began her training there her 18 year old daughter died in a tragic car accident. In a careful detailed manner this work explores both premonitory dreams as well dreams of mourning .

 In this very personal account Olson generously shares her inner world with the reader at a most vulnerable time in her life.  Through her process Olson instructs us in the stages of grief as well as how to analyze dreams with attention to every symbol, no matter how strange it may appear.

A few weeks before her daughter’s death, Olson had a nightmare of strange creatures dressed as horses on a beach. Her daughter is curious about them, runs with them and disappears. Although disturbing, Olson first dismissed the dream and only understood its significance after her daughter’s passing. In her research she discovered that horses are regarded as harbingers of death in many religions: they carry away the dead. Olson quotes Aniela Jaffe who wrote that  “premonitory dreams prepare us for an imminent and painful blow of fate by experiencing it beforehand in the mind”. (p24).

Olson refers to Jung’s own experiences with premonitory dreams a well as dreams of the deceased. Four months before Jung’s mother’s death, he had a dream where his father was preoccupied and asked Jung’s advice on marital psychology. After his mother’s death Jung realized that the dream was prescient, interpreting it to mean that his father was worried about how to accommodate his mother in the world beyond as they in fact had a difficult marriage in life. As well, the night before his mother died Jung had a terrifying nightmare where a huge wolfhound appeared and even in the dream Jung realized that the Wild Huntsman had ordered it to carry away a human soul.

Whether to interpret a dream objectively (relating to real people and events or our relationships to them) or subjectively (with the elements of the dream viewed as parts of ourselves) is always a puzzling matter, but especially so when we dream of the dead. For example, Jung’s dream of his father’s query about marriage could have easily related to Jung’s own difficult issues in his own troubled marriage at the time of the dream, but he preferred to relate it to his actual father and the imminent death of his mother. Perhaps one clue to whether the dream is premonitory is whether the dream contains archetypal images of death such as the horse or wolfhound which  “convey a numinous quality of the transition from life to death”.(p.38)

Following her discussion of premonitory dreams Olson goes on to an exploration  of dreams of mourning. In many of these dreams her daughter imparts important messages, the most poignant of which is given in the first dream of her daughter after she died. Olson, still in shock, had not been able to cry for her daughter. In the dream she sees her daughter, Elizabeth, and she hugs her and is crying and laughing, so glad to see her again. Elizabeth says, “Let your tears fertilize my ground”. When she awoke she cried for a long time. This dream, and subsequent others felt so powerful, so numinous almost as if Elizabeth was “objectively present” (p.48). It was as if Elizabeth began to be her guide through the grieving process.

In these kinds of reunion dreams  are we really  visited  by  the spirits of the dead or are these just dream images? This is a question Olson returns to again and again:

“… he (Jung)  sometimes equates dream images of the dead with their spirits or their actual existence in the hereafter. Since the reality of the afterlife and the existence of spirits cannot be verified, this position leads to predictable confusion. But there is another way to interpret dream images of the dead objectively, and that is to regard them as figures that represent our relationship with our loved ones as it existed before their death and it exists now. This viewpoint is meaningful to me because it offers an objective ”before and after” picture of our relationship with the dead. That relationship is an objective fact while they were alive, and it is an objective fact today, although it now exists on the imaginal, not literal level.”  (p. 65)

Reunion dreams help the mourner to transform grief, a more passive repetitive process, into mourning, which is more an active process of acceptance.

 Elizabeth died in a sudden tragic way (she was run down by a drunk driver) and Olson had dreadful traumatic nightmares about it. She dreamt of going back to the scene of the accident. When she actually visits it several months later she is surprised to discover that her dream accurately depicted the place as it was in reality. In many of these dreams there are images of Elizabeth’s wounded head and Olson tending to it. As Olson tried to heal Elizabeth’s wounds in her dreams, so the nightmares, as gruesome as they were, allowed her to heal as well.

Olson explores many references in myth and literature to death, dreams and the mourning process. She executes a thorough analysis of the myth of Demeter and Persephone and applies it to her process. She touches on the story of  Patroklos in the Iliad who begs Achilles in a dream to perform the proper funerary rites for his body. She discusses Shakespeare’s Hamlet whose father’s ghost appears to ask him to avenge his death. She asks fascinating questions, such as, “do the dead help us to individuate?” and “do the dead and the living meet in the world of dreams so that the dead learn from their survivors?

Eventually, about two years after her daughter’s death, Olson’s dreams seem to change. There are farewell dreams, where Elizabeth appears older, lighter, and happier.  She tells Olsen that where she is now she has a new name and then she is gone. Later dreams of Elizabeth seem less vivid, less numinous as the process of mourning comes to an end.

In writing this review I feel I cannot impart how rich this book is in its depth and exploration of the universal process of mourning. Nor has this review been able to describe how moving the book  is, and how beautifully it is written. I would highly recommend that you read it and find out for yourself.

          –Mary Harsany